Audience response gathering systems provide schemes for gathering and analysing responses by individual members of an audience. An example of such an application is a quiz show or contest where questions are asked, and players in the audience must respond by answering the questions. In most such contests players are required to answer within a specified time. Another example is a competition whereby the spectators of a sporting event predict the course of play, for example by responding at the end of each over of a cricket match by estimating the number of runs the next batsman will score.
The audience from which responses are gathered need not be located at the site of the event. For example, the audience could be a television audience spread over a whole country, or even world-wide. In the case of television audiences, the participation of viewers has to date been mostly limited to passive observation. To make the medium more effective, entertaining and educational, it has been observed that it is desirable to provide the opportunity for viewers to respond actively to programmes. Some attempts have been made to provide such interaction, but with only minimal success. The simplest means of viewer participation is by mail or telephone response, for example by inviting viewers to write letters or to phone specified numbers to register their opinion such as when voting for parties of a political debate. While these methods are simple and inexpensive, they lack immediacy, limiting their usefulness and appeal. For example, in the case of quiz shows it may be desirable to allow viewers to compete. To achieve this effectively, viewers' responses must preferably be recorded in such a way that the time taken to respond can be taken into account in judging the winner. Postal response is not suited for this as it is easy for competitors to cheat by recording the programme and researching questions at their leisure. Telephone response is more immediate but can cater for only a limited number of players. A number of interactive television systems have been proposed for allowing immediate response using communications from viewers' homes to central recording stations. Such systems suffer the limitation that the viewer's terminal, the communication system and recording stations must be complex and expensive. Another limitation inherent to such systems is that the number of simultaneous participants is limited by the bandwidth of the communications channel or other related technical constraints. Given that television audiences typically number many millions, only a small percentage can be accommodated using these techniques. These factors have severely limited the implementation of interactive television. Attempts have been made to provide systems of viewer response which do not require a return communication channel. One such system, described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,745,468 of Von Kohorn, uses a response comparator which receives response criteria from a broadcast signal and compares it to responses entered by a viewer at a keyboard. If the responses are correct, a card dispenser at the receiving station issues a card which can be used as a discount token, redeemed as cash or as some other form of reward. While this system is useful in some applications, viewers can cheat, for example by using a device capable of delaying the response criteria signal being received at the receiving station, thus allowing a greater time period in which to respond to questions. In cases where it is desired to collect scores at a central station, Von Kohorn's system uses printed cards or magnetic cards dispensed at the viewer's home as the score recording means. The apparatus required for this purpose is complex and expensive.
A further limitation of Von Kohorn's proposal is that if a keyboard is used for entering responses, a degree of special skill on the part of the user is required, which mitigates against fast responses in cases where free-form or unprompted responses are called for. This limitation has to date adversely influenced consumer acceptance of audience response systems which rely on keyboard entry of responses, including interactive television systems using bi-directional realtime communication. Von Kohorn suggests certain other forms of input device which could be used instead of the keyboard, but these are more complex and expensive.
Other proposed systems use information within the picture content of a television programme to transmit timing information to the viewer playing apparatus. One such system s described in Australian patent specification 59694/86, in which Drummond claims an invention which accepts a modulated optical signal from a predetermined point on a television screen as one input to an event adjudicator and an actuator which accepts a response from a viewer as a second input to the event adjudicator. The event adjudicator is arranged to determine which of the events occurs first, so that viewers can compete in competitions which require a response to be given before a signal is received from the broadcasting station. While this system does allow viewer participation to a limited degree, it is not well suited to competitions involving prizes, as it is possible for viewers to cheat, for example by recording the quiz show on video tape, researching the answers, and then replaying it at a later date, using Drummond's event adjudicator to record the results.
In the case of other types of audiences, such as the spectators of sporting events referred to above, gathering responses has been limited to predictions of play, generally written, before events start, such as betting on the outcome of a horse race, or estimating the margin by which one team will defeat the other. Although it is desirable to allow spectator interaction during the course of the event, such as predicting during the game the number of runs each player will score, systems for achieving this have been complex and expensive, and have as a result not been commercially successful.